Beginning to deconstruct
sexist and racist, patriarchal hermeneutics of God the Father

as a way of moving towards
a new liberating theology of God

Introduction

The inspiration
for this research project came from reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
The book is about Celie, an abused black female, and her experience with rape,
domestic violence, surrogacy and much more as she struggles to affirm herself
and her humanity within a racist patriarchal society. Celie, at the pinnacle
of frustration and anger, asserts: “the God I been praying and writing to is a
man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and
lowdown. …Let ‘im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women
the world would be a different place, I can tell you.” This poignantly bold
statement made by Walker through Celie not only critiques the “God Man,” but
also shifts the paradigm of how one approaches humanity’s relation to God. In Walker’s theodicy no longer is the emphasis placed solely on the individual being held
accountable to the commonly accepted notions of God. Instead, commonly accepted
notions of God are now being held accountable to the individual. Hence, in The
Color Purple, Walker holds God accountable to the experiences of an
oppressed black woman. Through life’s events and struggles, Celie is forced to
come up with new ways of seeing, talking about, and relating to God that affirm
all of who she is.

Celie’s spiritual development led me to assert the following: if one’s
notions of who and what God is do not affirm who one is, then one must break
with those notions of God on the basis that they are harmful and thus
maliciously detrimental. Using feminist and womanist critiques, this essay
will be a beginning act in deconstructing the sexism and racism endemic in the
patriarchal “Father God” hermeneutic as a way of moving towards a new
liberating theology of God. Ultimately, this project will call for a complete
de-canonization of the bible as authority on who/what God is.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple,
a true work of literary genius, explores and grapples with the complexity of
relationships within the black experience, providing a biting critique of a
racist patriarchal society in which black women are devalued because they are
neither male nor of the privileged race. Written in epistolic form, Walker’s incorporation and exploration of God shows true acumen into understanding the
richness of the black religious experience, in particular, the black female’s
experience.

One striking feature
that distinguishes the book The Color Purple from the movie is its
in-depth inclusion of God as a major aspect of the story’s plot. The book
opens with the line: “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your
mammy” (Walker 1). These are the words told to Celie by her rapist
stepfather. The first words Celie says are subsequently: “Dear God.” From the
beginning Walker sets up a paradigm in which Celie is forced into a
relationship with a God who is either too removed or too powerless to protect
her from her violator, or a God who actually condones her violation. As
Celie’s stepfather continues to rape her, more and more of her sense of
self-awareness and agency are taken away. Not even aware or in control of her
own body and sexuality, Celie bears her stepfather’s baby. When questioned by
her mother about who the father is, Celie responds by saying that the father is
God, for she “don’t know no other man or what else to say” (3). The previous
line can be interpreted the following two ways: 1) one can look at Celie’s
confession as her stating that she has not known any other man physically
besides her stepfather, or 2) her confession could be interpreted
metaphorically to mean that she has not known any other man but God.
Interpreting Celie from the vantage point of God being the only man she has
known sets up the interchangeability of man and God. Celie is thus bonded by a
divine patriarchy that rapes, uses, and abuses her with impunity; she is truly
stuck in what James Brown would term “a man’s world.” Celie is then married
off by her father to a man named Albert whom she only refers to as Mr., for she
does not know his name. At Albert’s house, Celie functions as a surrogate
mother and wife for Albert’s departed wife, and is subjected to more abuse and
degradation.

In one of Celie’s notes
to her estranged sister Nettie, Celie writes: “Dear Nettie, I don’t write to
God no more, I write to you” (Walker 199). Shug, Albert’s mistress whom he
brought home and with whom Celie develops a close relationship, asks Celie what
happened to God. Celie then asks Shug what God has ever done for her when Shug
responds by telling her: “He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that
love you to death” (199). Celie responds: “and he gave me a lynched daddy, a
crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see
again. Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act
just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown” (199).
After being told to hush by Shug, Celie goes on: “Let ‘im hear me, I say. If
he ever listened to poor colored women the word would be a different place, I
can tell you” (200). Celie and Shug continue their dialogue, and Celie
confesses: “All my life I never care what people thought bout nothin I did, I
say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come
to find out, he don’t think. Just sit up there glorying in being deaf, I
reckon. But it aint easy, trying to do without God. Even if I know he aint
there, trying to do without him is a strain” (200).

After more
conversation, Shug asks Celie to describe what her God looks like. After a bit
of hesitation and shame, Celie describes her God as being a big, old, tall
white man with a gray beard and big blue eyes. Shug tells Celie that the God
she described is the same God she used to see when she prayed. She then tells
Celie that if she waits to find God in church, that is the God that is bound to
show up because that is where he lives, “cause that’s the one that’s in
the white folk’s bible.” Astonished by Shug’s assertion, Celie admonishes that
God wrote the bible and that white folks had nothing to do with it. Shug then
poses the following questions: “How come he look just like them, then? Only
bigger? And a heep more hair. How come the bible just like everything else
they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored
folks doing is getting cursed?” (Walker 201-2). Celie tells Shug that she once
heard that Jesus’s hair was like lamb’s wool. Shug then tells her if Jesus
came to any of the churches they know he would have to have it conked before
anybody paid him any attention. Shug then says: “Ain’t no way to read the
bible and not think God white. When I found out I thought God was white, and a
man, I lost interest. You mad cause he don’t seem to listen to anything
colored say? Humph! Do the mayor listen to anything colored say?” (202). “I
know white people never listen to colored, period. If they do, they only
listen long enough to be able to tell you what to do,” responds Celie (202).

The above are snippets
taken from the powerful conversation between Celie and Shug. In the beginning
of the conversation, Celie again brings up the interchangeability between God
and man in that God is man and man is God. She charges God with being just
like all the other men she knows: trifling, forgetful and lowdown in addition
to deaf. Celie also confesses that although the God she believes in is
malignant, it is hard for her to do without “him.” “His” thoughts of her are
the only one she ever cared about. Hence, Celie feels bound to a God who is
deaf to her pain, a “divine male” that affirms the abuse she receives by earthly
males. This dialogue between Celie and Shug illuminates and exposes the very
danger in interlocking God’s essence with that of maleness. The inherent
maleness of God is best seen in the dominating, if not exclusive, metaphor of
“Father God.” This essay will now turn toward feminist thought on the subject
of “God the Father.”

Ruether, Sexism and God Talk

Rosemary Radford Ruether, author
of Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, opens her chapter on
“Sexism and God-language: Male and Female Images of the Divine” with the
following assertion: “Few topics are as likely to arouse such passionate
feelings in contemporary Christianity as the question of the exclusively male
image of God” (42). She asserts that the hostility shown towards accepting the
notion of God as a “She” has “deep roots in the Judeo-Christian formation of
the normative image of transcendent ego in the male God image” (42).

While some feminists
have tried to approach the task of breaking with the male exclusive transcendence
of God by reclaiming the feminine side of God, Ruether argues that this indeed
only intensifies on the divine level the patriarchal split of the masculine and
the feminine. She posits, “In such a concept, the feminine side of God, as a
secondary or mediating principle, would act in the same subordinate and limited
roles in which females are allowed to act in the patriarchal social order. The
feminine can be mediator or recipient of divine power in relation to creaturely
reality. […] But she can never represent divine transcendence in all
fullness.” Hence, “For feminist to appropriate the ‘feminine’ side of God
within this patriarchal gender hierarchy is simply to reinforce the problem of
gender stereotyping on the level of God-language” (61). In all, Ruether
proclaims that feminists need to go beyond simply lifting up the feminine side
of God and instead “question the assumption that the highest symbol of divine
sovereignty still remains exclusively male” (61).

Ruether defines
patriarchy as “not only the subordination of females to males, but the whole
structure of Father-ruled society: aristocracy over serfs, masters over slaves,
kin over subjects, racial overlords over colonized people” (61). In Ruether’s
definition, patriarchy is broadened to incorporate any over-and-against type
relationship between people or groups of people. At the apex of religious
stratifications and hierarchical systems of privilege and control is the
Divine. When it comes down to the God of the biblical tradition, Ruether
asserts that “Although the predominantly male images and roles of God make
Yahwism an agent in the sacralization of patriarchy, there are critical
elements in Biblical theology that contradict this view of God” (61). Although
Yahweh was still portrayed as being merciful, a mighty king, a warrior, and a
vindicator of justice, Yahweh is also, based on the Exodus, a liberator.
Norman Gottwald asserts: “the identification of Yahweh with liberation from
bondage allowed this diverse group [Israel in conjunction with nomadic groups
from the desert and hill peoples in Canaan] to unite in a new egalitarian
society and to revolt against the stratified feudal society of the city-states
that oppressed the peasant peoples of the hills with taxes and forced labor”
(qtd. in Ruether 62). For Ruether, this established at the heart of Biblical
religion a motif of protest against the status quo of ruling-class privilege
and the deprivation of the poor.

While Ruether
highlights the Yahwist tradition’s dissention with class hierarchy, she asserts
that it did not do the same for gender discrimination. She posits that gender
discrimination was not broken because the male prophets were not as conscious
of their own oppression of dependents, i.e., women and slaves, as they were of
their oppression by others. Hence, one can infer that the prophets were
blinded by their own male and class patriarchal privilege. In addition,
Ruether also asserts that the presence of females, queens and priestesses who
were integrated into powerful roles within the primary social stratification
made it difficult to recognize women as an oppressed gender group.

Ruether also highlights
that “a second antipatriarchal use of God-language occurs in the Old and New
Testaments when divine sovereignty and fatherhood are used to break ties of
bondage under human kings and fathers” (64). Ruether asserts that in the New
Testament prophetic consciousness is applied to marginalized groups in the
universal; hence, by redemption in Jesus, class, ethnicity, and gender
divisions are singled out to be overcome. Gender is recognized as an
additional oppression within oppressed classes and ethnic groups, thus women
are doubly oppressed. Ruether points out that in the New Testament Jesus
refers to God as “Abba,” which she believes affirms a primary relationship to
God that is based on love and trust. The term Abba, according to Ruether,
liberates the community from human dominance-dependence relationships and
instead welcomes them in joining the new community of brothers and sisters as
equals. Ruether claims that the gospel traditions reverse the symbolic
relation between divine fatherhood and sovereignty and the sacralization of
patriarchy. “Because God is our king, we need obey no human kings. Because
God is our parent, we are liberated from dependence on patriarchal authority”
(65). “Abba” as a name for God thus challenged patriarchal notions of
hierarchies and stratifications; over-and-against relationships are instead
replaced by relationships of mutuality under Christ. Women and those on the
underside have used this rationale to claim agency against human domination in
that their lord is now God and not earthly man.

While Ruether affirms
the positive aspects of the Abba tradition, she ultimately says that the
problem with the tradition was that once it became a part of the dominant
society, God as father and king can be assimilated back into the traditional
patriarchal relationships and used to sacralize the authority of human lordship
and patriarchy. She asserts: “The radical meaning of Abba for God is
lost in translation and interpretation. Instead, a host of new ecclesiastical
and imperial ‘holy fathers’ arises, claiming the fatherhood and kingship of God
as the basis of their power over others” (66). In response to this, Ruether
claims that there is a need for a new language that cannot be as easily
co-opted by the systems of domination.

Another area that
Ruether looks at in her creation of a feminist critique of patriarchy in
God-talk is the proscription of idolatry. She revisits the biblical
tradition’s proscription of idolatry in which Israel was to make no picture or
graven image of God. No pictorial or verbal representation of God could be
taken literally. She charges Christian sculpture and painting which represents
God as a powerful old man with a white beard (which is reminiscent of Celie’s
mental picture of God) sometimes crowned and robed in the insignia of human
kings or the triple tiara of the Pope as being idolatrous. It “set[s] up . . .
certain human figures as the privileged image and representation of God” (66).
She asserts: “To the extent that such political and ecclesiastical patriarchy
incarnates unjust and oppressive relationships, such images of God become sanctions
of evil” (66). She extends this proscription of idolatry to include verbal
pictures as well. “When the word Father,” claims Ruether, “is taken
literally to mean that God is male and not female, represented by males and not
females, then this word becomes idolatrous” (66).

Ruether highlights
that God revealed God’s self to Moses in the burning bush as “I am what I shall
be,” affirming, as she believes, that “God is person without being imaged by
existing social roles. God’s being is open-ended, pointing both to what is and
to what can be” (67). For Ruether, God is both male and female and neither
male nor female; therefore, she calls for a more inclusive language for God
that draws on the images and experiences of both genders in a way that does not
become more abstract because “abstractions often conceal androcentric
assumptions and prevent the shattering of the male monopoly on God-language, as
in ‘God is not male. He is spirit’” (67). Therefore, in Ruether’s rationale,
“inclusiveness can happen only by naming God/ess in female as well as male
metaphors” (67).

Ruether ultimately wants to move toward a feminist
understanding of God/ess. To do this, Ruether admonishes that male language
for the divine must lose its privileged place. She asserts: “If God/ess is not
the creator and validator of the existing hierarchical social order, but rather
the one who liberates us from it, who opens up a new community of equals, then
language about God/ess drawn from kingship and hierarchical power must lose its
privileged place” (69). According to Ruether, images of this new God/ess must:
1) include female roles and experiences; 2) be drawn from the activities of
peasants and working people, people at the bottom of society; 3) be
transformative, pointing us back to our authentic potential and forward to new
redeemed possibilities; and 4) not validate roles of men or women in
stereotypic ways that justify male dominance and female subordination (69).

Ruether poses that a new view of God/ess as
redeemer/liberator emerge as a solution to patriarchal God-talk. To do this
first calls for a split with male theology’s dualisms of nature and
transcendence, matter and spirit, and female and male. Ruether claims that
feminist theology needs to affirm the God of the Exodus, of liberation and new
being, but as rooted in the foundation of being rather than its antithesis, for
“The God/ess who is the foundation (at one and the
same time) of our being and our new being embraces both the roots of the
material substratum of our existence (matter) and also the endlessly new
creative potential (spirit)” (71). Hence, “God/ess” embraces both matter and
spirit. Ruether ultimately states:

The
God/ess who is the foundation of our being-new does not lead us back to a
stifled, dependent self or uproot us in a spirit-trip outside the earth.
Rather it leads us to the converted center, the harmonization of self and body,
self and other, self and world. It is the Shalom of our being. […]
[Hence,] The Liberating encounter with God/ess is always an encounter with our
authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not
experience against, but in and through relationships, healing our broken
relations with our bodies, with other people, with nature. (71)

Ruether has posited a God/ess figure who embraces matter
and spirit and calls individuals into harmony with themselves and the world
around them. An encounter with God/ess is an encounter with one’s self in
relationship to others. While Ruether offers no adequate name for this God,
she does assert, however, that there is a need to emerge from the false naming
of God/ess modeled on patriarchal alienation.

Daly: After the Death of God the
Father

To shine further light on the
quandary of the Father God metaphor, this essay will now turn its focus towards
the work of feminist Mary Daly. In her book, Beyond God the Father: Toward
a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Daly sums up the problem of patriarchal
God-talk with the following: “If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’
people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and
the order of the universe that society be male-dominated” (13). She asserts:
The symbol of the Father God, spawned by human imagination and sustained as
plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society
by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting”
(13).

Daly is interested in providing
alternate models that will break with patriarchy and instead lead to the
emergence of whole human beings. For Daly, it is not enough to simply have
females in male dominated positions. This phenomenon, described by Daly as
tokenism, does not change stereotypes or social systems but works to preserve
them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse. She claims that the minute
proportion of women in the United States who occupy generally male roles have
been trained by men in institutions defined and designed by men, and they have
been pressured subtly to operate according to male rules. Daly calls for an
emergence of woman-consciousness, a consciousness that will challenge the
system of patriarchy from without. The need for a force to work outside of the
system was made evident by Piaget who argued: “Structure is maintained by an
interplay of transformation laws that never yield results beyond the system and
never tend to employ elements external to the system” (qtd. in Daly 14).
Therefore, according to Daly, “women who reject patriarchy have this power and
indeed are this power of transformation that is ultimately threatening
to things as they are.”

Daly believes that the roles and
structures of patriarchy have been developed and sustained in accordance with
an artificial polarization of human qualities into the traditional sexual
stereotypes. She states:

The image of the person in authority and the accepted
understanding of ‘his’ role has corresponded to the eternal masculine
stereotype, which implies hyper-rationality (in reality, frequently reducible
to pseudo-rationality), ‘objectivity,’ aggressivity, the possession of
dominating and manipulative attitudes toward persons and the environment, and
the tendency to construct boundaries between the self (and those identified
with the self) and ‘the other.’ (15)

The opposite or this caricature, the “eternal feminine”
implies, on the other hand, “hyper-emotionalism, passivity, self-abnegation,
etc.” Daly opines that in “becoming whole persons, women can generate a
counterforce to the stereotype of the leader, challenging the artificial
polarization of human characteristics into sex-role identification” (15).
Daily believes that by challenging the stereotypes of sex-roles through
developing a wide range of qualities and skills, women are beginning to
encourage and demand a comparably liberating process in men: the becoming of
androgynous human persons. Daly asserts that it is the radical becoming of
androgynous human beings that has already begun to threaten the credibility of
religious symbols.

According to Daly, “religious symbols
fade and die when the cultural situation that gave rise to them and supported
them ceases to give them plausibility. Such an event,” she states, “generates
anxiety, but is part of the risk involved in a faith which accepts the
relativity of all symbols and recognizes that clinging to these as fixed and
ultimate is self-destructive and idolatrous” (15). Daly, like Ruether, is
calling for a movement away from exclusively male idolatrous representations of
Divine. She believes that the becoming of women must be known through an
active participation in overcoming servitude; the development of women’s
consciousness includes a flow of activism and creative thought that cumulates
in an awareness beyond the symbols and doctrines of patriarchal religion.

In a section titled “The Inadequate
God of Popular Preaching,” Daly argues that the image of the divine Father in
heaven has not always been conducive to humane behavior. She backs this
statement with the prevalence of “cruel” behavior of Christians towards
non-believers and dissenters among themselves. She asserts: “There has been a
basic ambivalence in the image of the heavenly patriarch – a split between the
God of love and the jealous God who presents the collective power of ‘his’
chosen people” (16). This paradigm facilitates a climate in which “The
worshippers of the loving Father may in a sense love their neighbors, but in
fact the term applies only to those within a restricted and unstable
circumference, and these worshippers can ‘justifiably’ be intolerant and
fanatic persecutors of those outside the sacred circle” (Daly 16). Therefore,
one can justify, under God, persecution of others if they fall outside of God’s
elect or chosen people.

Mary Daly argues that if God is male, then the
male is God. She believes that this divine patriarch, as long as it is allowed
to live on in the human imagination, castrates women by depriving them power,
potency, creativity, and the ability to communicate. In response to this
castration of women, Daly asserts that one must castrate God, i.e., the process
of cutting away the Supreme Phallus within the collective imagination. She
asserts that those theologies that hypostatize transcendence, those that
objectify “God” as a being, attempt in a self-contradictory way to
envisage transcendent reality as finite. “God” then functions to legitimate the
existing social, economic, and political status quo, in which women and other
victimized groups are subordinate (Daly 19). She posits that God-language has been
oppressive in the following three ways: 1) overtly when theologians claim
female subordination is God’s will; 2) when one-sex symbolism for God and for
the human relationship to God is used (exclusive male dialogue leaves women
feeling like the stranger, and outsider, an alienated person); and 3) when it
encourages detachment from the reality of the human struggle against oppression
in its concrete manifestations (19-20). Daly ultimately elevates the following
pragmatic yardstick for approaching God-talk: Does this language hinder human
becoming by reinforcing sex-role socialization? Does it encourage human
becoming toward psychological and social fulfillment, toward an androgynous
mode of living, toward transcendence? (21).

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, God The
Father

Robert Hamerton-Kelly’s
God the Father: Theology and Patriarchy in the Teaching of Jesus is
somewhat a response to feminist critiques about Father God’s patriarchal
overtone. Hamerton-Kelly specifically labels Daly’s critique of patriarchy as
a form of demonology. He critiques:

One may be excused
a certain skepticism, because of the sweeping nature of her [Daly’s] claims.
It is not clear that everything wrong with the human race can be attributed to
the way in which society is organized, nor that women are bearers of such
goodness as Daly believes. To make ‘patriarchy’ the root of all evil is
comparable to the way the Marxists use ‘capitalism’ in their analysis of the
world’s ills, and is a form of demonology. (6)

Although
Hamerton-Kelly does affirm some of Daly’s work, he ultimately states that one
must not focus solely on societal contribution (patriarchy), but also on
individual contributions. Hamerton-Kelly thus, before venturing “beyond God
the Father,” decides to reflect again on the role of the father image in the
Bible’s theology in the new light that comes from a changed culture.

Hamerton-Kelly
proclaims that “with reference to the father symbol, the Bible envisages two
modes of relationship between it and this ‘surplus meaning,’ an indirect and a
direct one. The former mode,” he writes, “is symbolization by association
while the latter is direct symbolization by metaphor or simile” (21).
According to Hamerton-Kelly, “In the indirect mode God is spoken of in
connection with the human fathers; he is the ‘God of the fathers’ and his
association with the fathers is his chief identifying feature; when we want to
think or speak of God we think and speak of the fathers,” whereas in the direct
mode: “the Bible uses either simile or metaphor: God is like a father, God is
our father” (21).

Hamerton-Kelly
believes that at the level of indirect symbolization, “father as applied to the
divine revelation means liberation” (100). He posits that father describes the
role that God played in the lives of the Israelites in liberating them from
bondage in Egypt. Hamerton-Kelly turns towards the book of Exodus as proof
text for this assertion. He claims that in the Mosaic tradition, the Exodus
story shows God as liberator. In freeing the people from bondage, God
“adopted” them as his people and made them his “first born son,” therefore, “by means of the idea of adoption any hint of a natural
relationship between God and Israel, father and son, is expunged, and replaced
by the idea of a free and gracious choice; election shows that the bonds of
fate are broken and a new relationship based on free reciprocity established”
(100). Based on this assertion, Hamerton-Kelly proposes that “father” thus
means freedom in two senses: 1) freedom from human bondage, and 2) the freedom
for a loving relationship with God based on faith rather than fate (100).
Hamerton-Kelly also proposes that during prophetic times, the possibility of
God’s grace in the present was celebrated by identifying with the fathers who
had experienced the liberation of the Exodus and had received the promise of
the land; thus “fathers” became the symbol of God’s liberating activity in
history (101).

As
far as direct symbolism is involved, Hamerton-Kelly writes: “The prophets used
the father symbol – now a less firm male image than before, and apt to take on
the characteristics of ‘mother’ from time to time – as a foil for their
indictments of Israel’s sin and as a basis for the people’s plea for
forgiveness” (101). He goes on to say that “it invokes the whole experience of
God’s saving activity on behalf of his people, a record for which they should
be grateful, and which, therefore, proclaims the perversity of their
unfaithfulness (101).

When
it comes down to Jesus, Hamerton-Kelly suggests that Jesus neutralizes the
absolute power of the earthly father by means of the claims of the heavenly
father, again reverting back to indirect symbolism, Jesus recovers the
presentation of God’s sovereignty as the sovereignty of liberating love which
desires free reciprocity (102). Hamerton-Kelly explains that the “impact of
this proclamation was to relativize natural family relations and to constitute
a new ‘family,’ the community of those who acknowledge God as Father” (102).
He asserts that sexism was not Jesus’ intent in referring to God as Father;
instead, “the effect of Jesus’ using it was to deprive the patriarchy, along
with everything else which is compared with the sovereignty of God, of its
absolute power. All in all, Hamerton-Kelly poses the idea that Jesus
experienced a peculiarly intimate relationship with God that made “father” the
appropriate symbol of his existence. Through this, “He invited his followers
to share in it by giving them the privilege of invoking God as ‘Abba,’ and that
privilege became the creative center of Christian worship” (103). It is thus,
according to Hamerton-Kelly, that fatherhood and son-hood symbolize the new
relationship of adult freedom in unionwith Christ,” it constitutes “the
new family of God which was united by bonds of faith” (103).

Ultimately,
Hamerton-Kelly upholds the notion of Father God as symbolizing grace and
freedom, maturity and faith, intimacy with the divine source of life, a
confidence in the final goodness of existence, the possibility of growth and
creativity (104). Hamerton-Kelly posits that the biblical symbol “Father”
means the opposite of what radical feminist like Daly suggest it to mean; it is
not bondage, dependence, or infantilism. Hamerton-Kelly concludes that it remains
the church’s responsibility to make the newly understood “fatherhood” central
to its understanding of God, and of human fatherhood, as to take a giant step
away from patriarchy and towards mutuality.

While Hamerton-Kelly provides a somewhat convincing case
about the positive aspects of “Father God” within the biblical narrative, he
would have done much better if he had taken more seriously the critique of the
feminist. As we saw earlier in the work of Ruether, there are some liberating
aspects to God as Father, as Abba. However, as Ruether points out, those
libratory aspects got lost in patriarchal translation. While no one is
claiming that Jesus’ intent was to be sexist, one cannot divorce the biblical
witness from the patriarchal and sexist climate in which it was written.
Hamerton-Kelly seems to make no connection between patriarchal influence and
the usage of “father” as the “appropriate” symbol of God’s existence. Why was
fatherhood and son-hood chosen to symbolize the new relationship of adult
freedom in unionwith Christ? What about motherhood and daughter-hood?
Hamerton-Kelly admitted himself that in the indirect mode God is spoken
of in connection with the human fathers; he is the ‘God of the fathers,’ his
association with the fathers is his chief identifying feature. This is highly
problematic because God is so connected with the fathers, and vice versa, that
one cannot think or speak of God without thinking or speaking about the
fathers. Women only get to God through the fathers, and when they do get to
God, God’s “chief identifying feature” is God’s association with the fathers.
This is the problem that feminist are rebelling against, the problem of man
being God and God being man. Hamerton-Kelly also ignores the solely male-dominated
language he uses to describe humanity’s relationship to God. Are women simply
to include themselves in this dialogue between males? The problem with
Hamerton-Kelly is that in entering into the dialogue from the privileged male
perspective, he failed to see the hurt and exclusion of women under a sexist
patriarchal system that affords them connection to God only through a
patriarchal system that leaves women with very little redress against the
aggression of males.

While
Hamerton-Kelly fails to see the hurt of women under patriarchal systems of
oppression, the feminists tend to do the same in failing to critique racism in
addition to sexism. While they strip God of sexist depictions, they leave
intact white depictions of God.

Delores
Williams

When looking at the oppression of
Celie’s God, we find that it is not only male, but also white. To reiterate,
in the conversation between Celie and Shug, Shug tells Celie that there is no
way to read the bible and not think that God is white. She says, “When I found
out that God was white, and a man, I lost interest. You mad cause he don’t
seem to listen to your prayers. Humph! Do the [white male] mayor listen to
anything colored say?” (Walker 202). I would like to suggest that it is this
uneasiness and inability to see God as something other than white and male that
evinces the sexist and racist patriarchal hermeneutic of white America’s
understanding of God. In the exclusivity of God’s maleness and whiteness,
other ways of knowing God outside of maleness and whiteness are cut off.
Whereas Ruether claims that the male God has to lose its privileged place if
women are to truly be liberated, I claim that in addition, the white God has to
lose its privileged place if black people are to be truly liberated.

Delores Williams, womanist theologian, states
in her book Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk:
“True enough, most Anglo-American women live only with the illusion of
authority and power, which is mostly derived from powerful males.
Nevertheless, white males and white females together often administer the
mainline social system in America that oppress black women and the black
family” (185). She claims that although many white feminists speak of
multilayered oppression, they do not give serious attention to the ways they
participate in and help perpetuate the terrible social and cultural value
systems that oppress all black people. Williams further asserts that the term
“patriarchy” is even lacking in that it leaves out much discussion about
classism and social relations that go on beyond white women and white men.
While Williams does not advocate white feminist to stop using the concept of
patriarchy to describe their relation to their fathers, brothers, and
other white males governing their world, she does advocate that for
patriarchy to be inclusive of black women’s experience in white society, there
needs to be discussion between womanist and feminist about revision of the
term; black and white women need to become conscious of the negative effect of
their historic relations (186).

Williams calls for the coming together of
feminist and womanist. Renita Weems states: “None of us [women] is safe from
the ravages of a society which makes room for only a chosen few and keeps at
bay the vast majority” (qtd. in Williams 187). Given this reality, Williams
proposes that if women “come together in compassion and concern for each other,
womanist and feminist can build bridges over which future generations of women
can cross from bondage to freedom” (187).

Williams affirms the great deed that feminists
have done in the world of theology. She writes: “The feminist identification
of what they describe as the patriarchal character of the Bible has done a
great service in showing the world that many portions of this book support the
oppression of women” (187). She also notes that both feminists and womanists
agree that the Bible cannot be scrapped because of the liberating word that is
also in the Bible and the hope that it brings some women. Therefore, what
Williams suggests needs to happen is a dialogue between womanist, theologians
and scholars in religion about biblical interpretation (hermeneutics). She
asserts that womanist hermeneutics must take seriously the assumption that the
Bible is “a male story populated by human males, divine males, divine male
emissaries and human women mostly servicing male goals, whether social,
political, cultural, or religious” (187). Hence, one must approach the Bible
with a hermeneutic of suspicion that recognizes and takes seriously this tint.

Williams ultimately claims that the womanist
survival/quality-of-life hermeneutic means to communicate the following to
black Christians: “Liberation is an ultimate, but in the meantime survival and
prosperity must be the experience of our people. And God has had and continues
to have a word to say about the survival and quality of life of the descendents
of African female slaves” (196).

Although the bible is male
centered and oppressive to women at times, Williams believes that it cannot be
completely scrapped. To deal with this problem of the biblical witness’s
patriarchal influence, Williams suggests that one approach the bible through a
dialogical hermeneutic of suspicion that has as its goal
liberation/survival/quality-of-life. Another individual who calls for a
hermeneutic of suspicion approach to rereading biblical text is biblical
scholar Renita Weems.

Renita
Weems’ Battered Love

In Battered Love:
Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets, Renita Weems talks
about biblical metaphors, in particular the marriage metaphor, and the weight
that they have. She brilliantly, yet simplistically, asserts that metaphors
matter because they are sometimes our first lessons in prejudice, bigotry,
stereotyping, and in marginalizing others – even if in our minds. She
admonishes that “Before we know it, in the innocent act of singing favorite
tunes, recounting jokes, and praying prayers, we can be advocating our demise
and the demise of everything and everyone dear to us – and not even know it”
(107).

Weems posits that with
the help of newer methodological approaches, those in biblical studies are able
to press beyond mere interpretation to criticism as a way of trying to step
outside the sublime ideology of the text, to understand where the text gets its
power and to find ways to challenge as much as possible the power it has over
us. She makes known, however, that this critique is not intended to destroy
the bible. Instead, it is to help those of us interested in reading and
interpreting the bible to find ethical ways to read intelligently and
responsibly (111). Weems asserts: “despite its dubious origin, despite its
attempts to hide the strategies that produced it, despite out dissatisfaction
with the language and perspective it uses to describe itself, we still find
gripping the glimpses of peace, justice, and love it offers readers, however
flawed and fleeting they might be” (111). Hence, Weems holds on to the bible because
she believes that there is some good to be gleaned despite its horrendous
flaws.

Although Weems upholds
gleaning the good message from the bible, she makes clear that one understands
that he or she is reading a text that rationalizes
and eroticizes violence, and that takes for granted one group’s power to
destroy another, something that should never be taken lightly. She also urges
against metaphors or biblical language that “cease[s] to be metaphorical
speech, a finger pointing beyond itself, and become[s] the finger itself,” when
“the thing signified becomes the signification itself” (112). The risk
of metaphorical language is thus the risk of “oversimplification and rigid
correspondence,” a risk that Weems suggest we must always be on guard against.
In her conclusion, Weems states that reinterpreting metaphors does very little
to change the fact that the bible’s culture takes for granted women’s limited
roles and goes out of its way at times to reinforce the notion that women’s
sexuality poses a dangerous threat to the social order.

The
Color Purple Revisited

In the second part of the dialogue between Celie and Shug,
Shug begins to tell Celie about her revised notions of who/what God is. Shug
says, “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world
with God. But only them that search for it inside find it” (Walker 202). Shug
confirms that God is not a he or a she, but an it. When asked by Celie what it
looks like, she responds: “It ain’t something you can look at apart from
anything else. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you
can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (203). Celie states
that she and Shug spoke more about God, but that she was still “trying to chase
that old white man out of my head.” She goes on to say, “I been so busy
thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn
(how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little
wildflowers. Nothing” (204). Shug then advises Celie that she has to get man
out of her focus. She says, “man corrupt everything. He on your box of grits,
in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere,
you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop
himself on the other end of it, tell him to get lost. Conjure up flowers,
wind, water, a big rock” (204). Celie then says to herself, “But this hard
work, let me tell you. He been there so long he don’t want to budge. He
threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all.
Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it” (204).

In
a letter Celie writes to Nettie, she says that she knows Nettie is not dead.
She says, “How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe like God, you
changed into something different that I’ll have to speak to in a different way,
but you not dead to me Nettie” (Walker 267). Celie subsequently begins the
last letter of the book with: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky,
dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (292).

Conclusion

In
the beginning of this essay, I asserted that if one’s notions of who God
is/what God is do not affirm who one is, then one must break with those notions
of God on the basis that they are harmful and thus maliciously detrimental. We
have seen the dangers of the “Father God” metaphor through both The Color
Purple and feminist and womanist thought. When God is imaged solely in
male form, it is easier for men to claim divinity as God’s elect sex. I would
agree with both Ruether and Daly that male language to describe God must lose
its privileged place. As Daly says, to not castrate this phallocentric
morality is to condone the castration of women. If we are truly to be a
liberated people on the side of survival, then harmful notions of God that
condone violence and oppression must lose their hold. As Weems shows us,
metaphors hurt, even if only in words.

Looking at The Color
Purple, one can see that Walker has set up a paradigm in which God is
within and without. Like Ruether’s notion of the God/ess that leads one back
to his or her converted center of harmonization of body and self and self and
the world, the God as presented by Shug and Celie also leads one on an inward
journey that results in the rebuilding of right relations between self and
others, self and nature, and self and God. Shug says that God is everything
that is or ever will be – the I am who I shall be God. It is only by breaking
with sexist, racist, and over-and-against patriarchal hermeneutics of God that
we can truly begin to experience the fullness of who/what God is. Like Celie,
I believe the widespread hurt and hopelessness of our society beckons us to
reevaluate how we talk about and relate to God; we are being called to talk
about God differently. However, I believe that to get to a better
understanding of who/what God is, we must first be open to experiencing God in
new ways.

Another important task
that I believe must be done is the de-canonization of the bible. All of the
scholars whose works are explored above say that one could not completely scrap
the bible because there are some glimpses of a liberating message, as well as
material that has supported and sustained many individuals through hope. While
I agree that the bible should not be scraped, I also believe that to leave the
bible in its elevated, canonized space is to ultimately elevate and canonize
patriarchy. As long as this patriarchal text is canonized, then patriarchy
will be affirmed under the sacred canopy of biblical witness. In canonizing and
absolutizing the biblical witness, we miss out on ways in which God is working
and incarnate in history today.